Bach Flower Remedies

Nature’s Gift for Healing, Pure & Simple

…those herbs of the field placed for healing, by comforting, by soothing, by relieving our cares, our anxieties, bring us nearer to the Divinity within. And it is that increase of the Divinity within which heals us. —Dr. Edward Bach, M.B., B.S., M.R.C.S., D.P.H

When I was first introduced to Dr. Bach’s remedies in the late 1980s, I had no idea how significant his work would become in my life. Looking back, I was on a path that was totally unexpected. It led me to my practitioner training of three years with the Dr. Edward Bach Foundation and Centre-UK, which I completed in 1997, and at the same time my Master’s degree from DePaul University, Chicago, where much of my research focused on Bach’s remedies as an adjunct therapy in the treatment of eating disorders and other emotional illnesses. A few years ago, I added a Practitioner Intensive course sponsored by Patricia Kaminsky and Richard Katz of FES (Flower Essence Service), to my experience which introduced me to the North American flower remedies, an expansion in many ways of Dr. Bach’s work.

Since 1997, I’ve presented numerous workshops on Bach and his remedies in the United States and Great Britain; spoken at international conferences; trained members of the clinical medical community and hundreds of staff across the Whole Foods Market national network, as well as independent health food stores and co-ops. I’ve written articles, books, and counseled private clients. While I’ve had to cut back on some of these activities, I continue to write, see private clients, and offer workshops upon request. For more information on these activities, please refer to my published works and education and consultation pages.

The Soul’s Agenda

In the 1920s, long before the advent of Kirlian photography, Edward Bach, a young British physician, dropped a spiritual bomb on the world of orthodox medicine. Taking his highly respected work in bacteriology and immunology out of the lab and into nature, he discovered that there appeared to be a subtle energetic and spiritual healing connection between the life force of certain flowers and distressed human emotions. Bach’s discovery evolved into what we know today as the 38 Bach Flower Remedies. They are in fact a spiritual and energetic system capable of harmonizing our mind, body and spirit into a state of wholeness.

Bach died at the early age of 50 in 1936, but now, more than 80 years after he discovered his first remedies, the Bach remedies are one of the world’s major therapies in complementary medicine. Homeopathic in nature and considered vibrational/energy medicine, there are now hundreds, if not thousands of flower remedy repertoires around the globe, the majority of which are based on Edward Bach’s work. In this remarkable evolution, the remedies have fueled an increasingly radical shift in thinking about how distressed emotions are related to the appearance of illness.

It was his belief that conflict between the soul’s agenda and the personality resulted in illness and that the key was to treat the whole person, not just the symptomology of the illness. He was explicit in his opinion that each of the 38 remedies possessed a specific energetic, emotional signature, positively capable of balancing out negative or contracted emotional states clouding the soul’s innate wisdom; certainly in today’s world, he would be considered a holistic physician. Using his philosophy as a foundation, the remedies in application seem to take us down to our core where we can come to know our soul’s agenda. Simultaneously, they also appear to affect emotions on our temporal and historical levels, meeting us where we are and acting as catalysts. In this process, it is as if they move our personal mythology from darkness to light, breaking down the soil that holds the roots of negative emotions, thus shifting the perception of our emotional environment. In these shifts from toxic to non-toxic patterns, the remedies are as unobtrusive as working with the breath. They are agents of change.

Achieving Mind/Body/Spirit Harmony with Flower Remedies

While Edward Bach was known for his discovery of the remedies, his esoteric interests spread beyond this work. He was a Freemason and his personal writings, though sparse, are certainly spiritual in nature. In addition to astrology, there are indications that he had, at the very least, a passing curiosity in Eastern philosophies and the Chakra system. Given these facts, while I suspect he felt the time wasn’t right to vocalize such theories, it seems more than possible that he saw an important relationship between the energetic and emotional interaction of these two systems and their affect upon our states of wellbeing.

Over the years, interest in the esoteric philosophy of the East has broadened, particularly concerning the relationship between emotional responses and our external environment. Whether we respond to this environment with faith or fear depends, in large part, upon the intertwined emotional and energetic patterns of our mind, body and spirit. The negative imprints of disharmonious emotions within our energetic bodies not only facilitate a contraction from connection to our soul’s agenda, but conversely, positive imprints facilitate expansion toward the soul. This process is as fluid as the flow of mercury.

At the end of the day, a central theme for each of us is harmonization within our internal nature and externally with the divine, a state which we often forget as we speed toward and through the wonders of technology and modern life. In truth, nature is symbiotic with our individual soul’s agenda, something the ancients intuitively knew long before the age of technology. They knew that all life energy is connected and that it is the divine nature that enfolds and balances us on all levels in our quest for connection to our evolution.